50 Years of “That’s Entertainment”

May 17, 1974 was the premiere date of a surprising pop culture phenomenon, unexpected at the time, and maybe even confounding to those too young to have been there. On that day, the foundering studio MGM released That’s Entertainment!, a compilation film made up entirely of old clips from the studio’s catalog, mostly musicals, with voice-overs by classic era stars Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Jimmy Stewart, Bing Crosby, Elizabeth Taylor, Peter Lawford, Debbie Reynolds, and Frank Sinatra. And Liza Minnelli, not a classic era star, but the daughter of director Vincent and the late Judy Garland, as well as the then-wife of the film’s producer Jack Haley, Jr, himself the son of Garland’s Wizard of Oz co-star Jack Haley.

This, remember, was the rock and disco era, and a time of gritty, envelope-pushing films like The French Connection and Serpico. But as we wrote here, there was also a thread of nostalgia that permeated those times. For older folks this movement catered to their memories of their own era, a time before the upheavals of the ’60s and ’70s. For the counterculture, there was often a feeling of camp attached to it. And for impressionable young people like me it was an introduction to vintage entertainment. This is how someone of my tender age (!) would be turned on to something like vaudeville, which died over 30 years before I was born.

MGM was in pretty dire straits at this point. They were still producing movies, but a series of big budget box office bombs had substantially hobbled the organization. For a real hoot (at least I think so) watch the Lionpower promotional shorts released by the studio in the late ’60s, which trumpet a seemingly endless succession of lame-sounding movies, most of which you’ve never heard of, yet all with top movie stars. Saddest of all, in 1973 and 1974 the studio was forced to sell off its fabled backlot and all of its contents, such as costumes and props from classic movies. You can see some of what was left when the smoke cleared in the 1974 film The Phantom of Hollywood, and in some of the wraparounds captured for That’s Entertainment!

So MGM needed a hit at this point in time, and to everyone’s shock they got one in this movie made entirely out of existing clips. It wasn’t unprecedented. Robert Youngson and Harold Lloyd had gotten some play out of pastiches like that at the box office a decade earlier. But you must admit that it was rare. It was so successful that there were sequels to That’s Entertainment in 1976, 1985, and 1994. Not to mention a very similar TV series (also executive produced by Haley) called That’s Hollywood, which ran from 1976 through 1982. That series was narrated by Tom Bosley and produced by 20th Century Fox Television. I have to think that Don Adams’ Screen Test(1975-76) was part of the same wave.

Nowadays the definition of “classic movie” has moved, at least among younger people. Many of the films now called classic came out AFTER That’s Entertainment! And as I write this, That’s Entertainment! is as old now as MGM was when That’s Entertainment! came out. Think on THAT while you’re whittling Gene Kelly’s likeness on your front porch!

For more on early film please check out my book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube.